CHAPTER XXV
THE BUENOS AIRES WOMAN
IN the tonneau of his big limousine—one of the largest in Washington—the usually genial secretary of the treasury displayed a troubled frown, while, so close to his face that the breath of that neighbor's speech rustled his gray side whiskers, he listened to the deductions of the chief of the secret service.
“It's all a process of elimination,” said Boyle, chewing his cigar emphatically. “I'm sorry for poor old Farley, and, except by elimination, we can't get a thing on him. But somebody's got to be the goat, or the administration will catch the Old Harry. These fake notes are all over the place. There aren't so many of them, but they're scattered about everywhere, and the rumor's got out about them— only on the inside of course, but out, all right—and the plain fact is that there isn't any clew as to how they got there. Well, then, Farley had and has facilities that nobody else could have, and that's all there is to it!”
The chief was always direct. He believed in going straight to the point, however brutally. So when the pair arrived at their destination and were finally ushered into Farley's private office, he gave that gentleman eye for eye.
Not so the little secretary of the treasury. One sidelong glance showed him the drawn pallor of the suspected man's careworn face and the stoop of his shoulders, which recent worry had forced there. The secretary kept intact the genuine heart of the old-line politician; he kept it firm, but in the right place, and so he now blustered in his fussy manner to cover a regret quite honestly poignant.
“Mr. Farley,” he finally began, “the government, as you are well aware, is most disturbed. You've no good news, I fear, in this—er—Fillmore note paper?”
Farley shook his tired head.
Boyle continued to regard the superintendent steadily through his sharp eyes that never wavered.
“The treasury department,” said its secretary, “has come to a standstill in the affair. We've—well, we've—well, we've just got to throw up our hands.”
“You mean”
The secretary blew his nose. He had a way of blowing it ostentatiously when he was worried. “Public disgrace threatens us,” said he. “That's what it amounts to. Things can't be hushed up indefinitely. Every bank in the country knows, and when things are once known privately, it's never a long time before they are known publicly, too. The coming elections, if I may speak quite openly”
“Do, please,” said Farley. “But I understand what you're driving at.” He passed a hand across his eyes and tried to smile. “You mean that—that I must go.”
Boyle clapped him on the shoulder. “I'm glad you take it that way!”
But Farley was no fool. He guessed, suddenly, what lay behind the chief detective's masquerade of good-fellowship. To pay the disciplinary penalty for an executive error was one thing, but to be suspected of overt crime was another. Crime—after his long life of denial, of hard devotion to routine duty—after his record that bore only this single blot! His cheeks turned gray. He looked at Boyle with a quick, puzzled gasp:
“Only—why you can't really think I'm—that I'm guilty?”
It was an abrupt climax, but before Boyle could answer, the office door was thrust open. There stood Miss Greene, tight lipped, yet evidently almost bursting with news. Long training made her look only to her employer for permission to speak.
The male trio scowled at her intrusion. Farley's nerves were on edge.
“Well?” he asked sharply.
“There are three men outside, with three plainclothes men besides. They say—that is, one of them says he must see you at once. It's a Mr. Hoagland”
“Hoagland!” shouted the chief of the secret service. “Bring him in!”
“What is it?” gasped Farley. He began to mop his brow.
Boyle made a sapient gesture that meant “Wait and see.” He had no idea what was coming.
The guards did not enter, but Hoagland, smiling profusely, bustled forward at once, his derby hat in one hand. Behind him followed a sturdy, boyish person with frank eyes and a shock of tow-colored hair, and behind him—and quite as if he were glad to accompany them—a broad, big, genial gentleman, carrying a Malacca cane strapped to one wrist, a gentleman immaculately clad in speckless white, whose dark glances flashed from the now incarnadined Miss Greene to the group about the desk, and whose fat hands were lavishly decked with rings.
“Well?” snapped Boyle, who had no intention of betraying any lack of omniscience. “Let's hear what you've got to say, Mr. Hoagland.”
Hoagland did not at once directly answer his chief. He had his own pride and his own love for the dramatic. Not to be robbed of their indulgence, he had carefully refrained from telegraphing any news in advance. He pushed forward the younger of his two companions and addressed the general assemblage.
“This is Doctor Daniel Gurney Stone,” said he, “or almost a doctor,” he corrected. “He's proved himself of invaluable assistance to us, and this”—he pointed to the smiling foreigner—“is Señor Ramon Villeta—according to himself—and he can give you some information about those Fillmore plates.”
Don Ramon made a sweeping bow.
Farley leaned forward and looked at the recent planter with puzzled interest.
“I've seen you before, but I can't think” Then he remembered.
Boyle was entirely what he would have called “practical.” Quite as if he had never had the least suspicion of Farley, he now addressed Hoagland. “Have you got the plates?”
“Sure.” The agent handed out a carefully wrapped package. “You know what an altar stone is, chief? I traced these to an altar stone.”
“Of course you did,” said Boyle.
But his assertion lost all its potential effectiveness in the common rush to examine that offered package.
There arose a general sigh. Each in his own way, the Washington officials certified the contents of that parcel to be what they had just been pronounced.
The secretary of the treasury cleared his throat. He pulled at his whiskers and opened his mouth. He was patently glad, however, that Hoagland postponed for him the immediate necessity to apologize to Farley.
“Remember Tucker?” Hoagland inquired of Boyle. “Skinny, lanky guy—government engraver with a chronic grouch?”
The head of the secret service nodded noncommitally. It was Farley who gave eager assent, and to him, as the more appreciative, Hoagland then addressed himself:
“Extra disgruntled. He resigned about six months ago. I've a hunch my friend, Señor Villeta, had something to do with it. Well, as the chief here knows, I'd had Lawson and Sweeney and myself following paper, mostly around Brooklyn wharves, and that's how I struck the lead. The counterfeiters' mistake was in wanting to overdo the thing, like that Pennsylvania case, where the fellows got away with their bills, but were caught by their cigar stamps. This gang ran short of paper and sent up for more.”
“Yes—yes,” said Farley. “And you followed that clew?”
“Went to Santo Domingo with the fresh supply, and there I found this Tucker had been making hay while the sun shone on Señor Villeta's ranch—or while it didn't! Night work, you know. I ran into a lively mess, I can tell you, but Doc Stone helped me out. Still, that's a long story, and Tucker's dead now”
“And so you got these plates?”
“Yep, and cabled our consul to have the captain and mate of the ship the gang used held for further orders at Port of Spain, where I knew they had condensed milk to deliver. Then I came back. It was a side partner of Tucker's shipped the paper; I gathered him in as I came through N'York this morning, but he doesn't know much, so I left him locked up downtown, here in Washington, and”
“Did you get any of their product?”
“The phony money?” Hoagland's face fell. “Just this.” He produced a few charred hills. “All the rest was burned up in the chapel where they stored it. Money to burn Villeta had—and he burned it, all right!”
Then, for the first time during this interview, Dan Stone spoke. Out of a trousers pocket, he pulled his ten bills.
“I've got this, sir. I was paid it for—well, for semiprofessional medical services.”
He placed his thousand dollars on the desk. Boyle, however, had succeeded in securing attention by turning upon the Santo Domingan.
“I came across you just nine years ago, my friend,” he was saying; he had the good detective's memory for faces. “It was a little matter of opium smuggling then, but we couldn't get the goods on you. We suspected your wife, too. Where's she now?”
Don Ramon shrugged lightly. “My new wife, you mean, the wife I married two—three years ago—yes? Oh, she is in no way concerned in the present enterprise. She is living in Buenos Aires.”
There came a loud gasp from the door. Every one stared thither. Miss Cecilia Greene, whose continued attendance had been overlooked by Villeta, crouched there in a state closely verging on collapse. Nevertheless, even as they all stared, she was pulling her statuesque frame together and already pointing a finger at the foreigner.
“You—you” she exclaimed.
On her invitation, Mr. Farley had once, it will be recalled, dined at his stenographer's boarding house. In those days he considered it good business to be on terms of personal acquaintance with his office force; and in those days he regarded this one of its members rather as a fellow government clerk than as a woman. Now he colored slightly as he dutifully inquired:
“Miss Greene, isn't this Señor Villeta a gentleman who used to live where you do?”
She covered her face with those pathetic hands for ten years so efficient in the bureau's service.
“I—I thought that he and I were going to get married!” she blurted. “He made love so—so wonderfully! Oh, I'm so sorry, Mr. Farley!”
Farley bowed his head. “Go on,” said he.
“Well, then, I'd refused a lot of other men, because I thought you were going to promote me, and at last it was plain you wouldn't.” She lowered her hands and raised her eyes to Farley's with sudden defiance, but as quickly looked away. “When I found I was mistaken, I—I—I guess I was a fool. Anyhow, that's why I borrowed them for him.”
All but two of the men regarded the handsome penitent with a mixture of bewilderment and compassion.
“Explain yourself!” Boyle ordered.
Quick to attempt to retrieve his error, Don Ramon turned to her. “But, my dear Miss Cecilia, I am assuredly going to marry you!”
He was too late.
“You—you beast!” she cried. She triumphed. “What about the wife in Buenos Aires?”
She gave him a wholly withering scorn. Boyle had stepped over to her. He grasped her arm as in a vise.
“How did you do it?” he bellowed in her ear.
“Don't hold me like that!” She shook him off. “And don't yell. It's rude.”
“Well?” he demanded, but he let go his hold and lowered his voice.
“Mr. Farley,” said Miss Greene, ignoring the secret-service chief and, for some occult reason, facing Dan as the least unsympathetic man in view, “Mr. Farley had made up the fresh combination of the safe on December 30th. I knew he would—I've not been here for years for nothing!—and I believed Don Ramon—I mean, this creature—when he said he just wanted a glimpse at them.”
“At what?” asked Boyle. “The plates?”
“Of course, silly! Because he said he was going to be head of the Santo Domingan treasury department and wanted some ideas about plate making, only America was sort of in control of the island and wouldn't let him do anything. Oh,” she broke off, “I know I was a fool to believe him, and I knew then it was dreadfully wicked, but I thought Mr. Farley”
That one interrupted. He still spoke as a man determined to perform a painful duty:
“I remember,” he explained to the company, “that Miss Greene was—er—very much annoyed about not getting Dodd's position. Nevertheless, I must add that I did not speak the combination aloud, and no one—not even she—saw the paper on which I wrote it.”
The stenographer looked at him with sad eyes, but she went on: “Not exactly, Mr. Farley; only, when you worked it out, you did write it down in ink and you blotted the paper on your desk blotter. I was watching and I know. While you were out of the room giving Mr. Dodd and Mr. Lemmell their halves of it, I read the blotted numbers by simply copying them exactly on a sheet of tracing paper and holding that to the light. When we were closing up, I brought some unnecessary papers into the vault, straight past Jenkins, the guard. Oh, I often had to do that, and he never looked into the room—why should he?—he always looked out—that was the way any burglar had to come from! Well, I just opened the safe quickly, stuffed the unnecessary papers under my dress, so he'd see they were gone if he had sense enough to think about them at all—and stuffed the plates there, too, of course—and then I went directly to the ladies' dressing room.”
“And then?” It was Boyle who spoke now. He waved down Farley's hand that was raised in protest against harshness. “And then?”
She glared at him. “In there I pinned on my hat and powdered my nose, but first I wrapped the plates in oilcloth.” She pointed to Ramon. “He'd provided it.”
“Where did you hide them?”
“Where he told me to; in the box up top that holds the water.”
“But,” protested Farley, still loyal to his system, “every employee is searched on leaving!”
“Yes, sir. Only that was a day before a holiday. I was searched as usual. I said I'd forgotten my bag—must have left it in the dressing room—which I'd done, too, on purpose—so I ran up and stuffed the plates again under my dress and just ran back and opened my bag for the inspector to show him nothing was in it that shouldn't be. He was in as much of a hurry as I was. Then—then I went to the matinee and gave this—this Don Ramon the plates!”
“And what did you do next?” Boyle kept the inquisitorial preeminence that he had acquired with so much difficulty.
“Why, next,” pursued Miss Greene, now only too ready to convict both herself and her false admirer, “next, he gave them back, the way he'd promised to, on the Tuesday morning when I stopped at the boarding house after being at my sister's in Alexandria. I'd been near crazy all the time they were gone, Mr. Farley. And he”—the memory was almost too much for her—“he thanked me and said I'd helped a poor, oppressed government and wouldn't ever have cause to regret it.”
She paused only to dab her eyes with a crumpled handkerchief. She launched defiance at her quondam lover.
“And so,” she continued, “after the plates were missed on Tuesday morning—we weren't searched when we came in, you know—I reached over your head, Mr. Farley, as if I was looking for them, too, and put them on the wrong shelf and found them there. Nobody'd ever suspect me,” she said bitterly to Boyle; “but I guess this—this beast copied them while he had them. Only, I give you my word, I never dreamed he'd lied—not till months afterward.” She turned on the fat Lothario. “You're a crook,” she said to Don Ramon, “a crook! And I want you to know that, since I found you out, I've—I've become engaged to an honest man—I've become engaged to Mr. Farley.”
The very room gasped its surprise. Everybody turned to the superintendent.
“Ahem!” coughed the thus announced fiancé.
“Eh?” asked the secretary of the treasury.
“It's quite true,” admitted Farley, with a sudden blushing recrudescence of youth. “Of course, I didn't know till now”
“Will it make any difference between us?” demanded Cecilia Greene. There was a certain largeness about her gesture, though her eyes were moist, “because if it does, you're free.”
She was really very handsome, and she had been at last undeniably truthful. Farley looked at her.
“It won't,” said he, and then challenged criticism from everybody.
None was forthcoming. Boyle had walked back to the desk and was examining the plates that his agent had brought.
“Villeta,” said he, “we've got to hand it to you for one thing. These are just about flawless. I congratulate you on being the most expert counterfeiter the service has ever come across.”
Don Ramon, now that Farley's stenographer had done her worst against him, was his best self once more. He bowed a deprecating acknowledgment to Boyle. Then, with an inclination of apology to Miss Greene, he calmly usurped her place in the limelight. He coughed softly behind a fat hand with outspread, ringed fingers, and, having thus secured the desired attention, said:
“Gentlemen, I am about to denounce the guilty man—and to prove—prove—that I am not he, that he is a member of the cabinet of the President of your United States.”